Satin Dreams (5 page)

“
Fortune
magazine, Jack, you know all about it,” Mindy reminded him. She gave the PR woman in the doorway a meaningful look. “They’re going to do a series on how you’re opening the Maison Louvel.”
 

“Another goddamned writer who wants to follow me around.” The public relations woman went out, closing the door behind her. He sat back in his chair, the photographs in his hand. “I said no, remember? I hate writers after what
W
did to me last year. I nixed the idea back in New York.”
 

If Jack was going to be difficult, Mindy was going to miss her flight. “We turned down the
Wall Street Journal
on this,” she said evenly. “It’s not just a rag trade piece, it’s straight financial news, worldwide. We could use that right now. The writer’s Chris Forbes; he won a Pulitzer Prize for a story on the American automobile industry.”
 

Jack made a face. “An expert on
automobiles?
Why not somebody who knows the fashion business? Or is that too much to ask?”
 

He put down the photographs and picked up copies of French
Elle
and
Vogue
marked for his attention. Several tear sheets were attached, showing Gilles Vasse’s winter collection. Jack Storm rested his elbows on the desk, his dubious expression revealing that he didn’t like Gilles Vasse’s clothes any better now than the first time he’d seen them.
 

“Gilles is very innovative.” Mindy craned her neck to look at the photos in Jack’s hands. “He’s definitely a comer.”
 

Jackson Storm examined a layout of violet felt winter coats with disbelief. On the opposite page a redheaded model wore a sheath of glitter that seemed to imprison her in laser beams. Both designs were from Rudi Mortessier’s current collection. But the credits read, “Designed by Gilles Vasse.”
 

“A hot, really up-front talent is what investors are looking for right now.” Mindy had never been a Gilles Vasse enthusiast, but
Women’s Wear Daily
and the fashion slicks were predicting big things from the designer who was still in his early twenties.
 

“He’s a kook.” Jack stared at the photographs. “Who’s he designing for—aliens from outer space?”
 

“Jack, he also does Rudi Mortessier’s bread and butter, the wedding gowns, the trousseaus, the traditional stuff. Gilles’s work can be very commercial, with the best.” Mindy looked at her watch again. “He’s a good choice. Besides,” she added, “his wife’s pregnant. He could use the money.”
 

Jack Storm’s tanned, fleshy face was thoughtful. It was true, investors went for hot new talent. And he was getting desperate for something to entice investors. A few months ago he had interested a French banking group in the Maison Louvel, but after an incredible amount of schlepping around, the French bankers had cooled off, citing problems with Third-World development loans. That left only a dark horse, the Palliades-Poseidon Corporation, a giant shipping line owned and operated by, in Jack’s opinion, the usual Greek lunatics. God knows how Greek ship owners felt about haute couture. Or if they even knew what it was.
 

He stared at the magazine layouts of Gilles Vasse’s clothes with the expression of a cornered man. “This is a coat? My Uncle Morris Lifshitz, the best cutter on Thirty-First Street, God rest his soul, wouldn’t vomit on this. It’s not a coat—it’s damned kamikaze armor!”
 

“
Samurai,
Jack.” Mindy studied the photograph. Even upside down it was startling. “
Samurai
armor.”
 

“Samurai, sushi, kamikaze, it’s the same thing.” He held up the typewritten report that said Gilles Vasse seemed eager to stretch his professional wings and leave Rudi Mortessier. It also mentioned that the young designer wasn’t making all that much money.
 

“The kid’s already getting a credit in Mortessier publicity,” Mindy pointed out. “He’s got a good rep.”
 

Jack Storm hesitated for a long moment. “I heard Gilles Vasse and Rudi Mortessier had something going once. Weren’t they lovers?”
 

Mindy could only stare. She’d thought they were free and clear. The French search team had assured her Gilles Vasse had no written contract with his employer. Was this a new complication?
 

She said cautiously, “You don’t have to make up your mind today, Jack. Look, why don’t you talk to the
Fortune
magazine guy, now? I’ve got to make the Concorde—”
 

“You haven’t answered my question.”
 

She sighed. “Gilles Vasse is married, Jack. He and his wife are expecting a baby.”
 

He snorted. “Since when does that prove anything? It’s back to the closet since AIDS. He could have ten wives.” He flipped irritably through the pages of
Elle
and
Vogue,
noticing that the model wearing the Gilles Vasse creations was one and the same. “I like the girl.” With her flame-colored hair and amazing eyes, she was certainly beautiful enough to help any designer. “How much credit does she get for putting this kid’s stuff across?”
 

Mindy knew Jack could never resist a beautiful woman. There had been a fairly long parade of Storm King “discoveries” and most of them, much to Jack’s credit, had profited by the arrangement. Several Jackson Storm models had gone on to successful careers in television and films. And then there had been the beautiful jeans girl, their media image for Sam Laredo western wear, who had nearly broken up Jack’s marriage.
 

They were thinking the same thing as they turned to the silver-framed photograph propped on the edge of Jack’s desk. The picture had been taken several years ago for a layout in
Town and Country
magazine, and showed former model Marianna Storm seated in the living room of her elegant Connecticut house with two pretty teenage girls. Mrs. Jackson Storm and daughters.
 

How many newspaper and television interviews, Mindy wondered, had quoted Jack saying he loved his wife as he could never love any other woman? That he would never subject his family to the heartbreak of divorce. And though Jack loved to develop new talent, Marianna always let her husband know when she’d had enough of his “protégés.”
 

Mindy was still staring at the photograph when Jack turned back to the papers in front of him. “So tell me, what do Vasse’s designs look like with someone else wearing them? Is the girl part of his act?”
 

“Jack,” Mindy began. She was interrupted when Candace opened the old-fashioned frosted glass door again.
 

“Mr. Storm,” the PR woman said rapidly, “I hate to bother you a second time, but we have a problem. There’s a man here who won’t—”
 

The door seemed to leap from her grasp, slamming back on its hinges, the frosted glass rattling as though it would shatter.
 

Their intruder paused in the doorway. Well over six feet, lean and sleekly pantherish in an impeccable black Chesterfield overcoat, he had an air of disdain. He was not, they sensed at once, the writer from
Fortune
magazine.
 

“I’m Nicholas Palliades,” he informed them in a clipped, husky voice, as if that explained everything.
 

In a manner of speaking, it did.
 

Jack Storm scrambled to his feet.
The Greeks,
was his first reaction. His second was that this unannounced visit, barging in without even a telephone call, was no way to do business. Not even in the crazy rag trade. But Jack gritted his teeth, reminding himself how desperate he needed backers for this new venture.
 

“Right.” Jack glanced around for an extra chair, but Mindy had already slipped past him to get one from another office.
 

The man in the doorway didn’t move. His black, almond-shaped eyes, aquiline nose, and clamped, unfriendly mouth, were surprisingly tough-looking considering the aura of wealth and elegance. Nicholas Palliades looked more like a Balkan hill-country bandit than a millionaire Greek aristocrat.
 

Jack had always found it hard to keep the Greeks sorted out. Niarchoses, Goulandrises, Onassises, Embiricoses—there were just too many of them. However, with the Palliadeses, one didn’t forget. Scandal sheets like the
National Enquirer
kept running accounts of their lurid lives, their marriages, mistresses, feuds, even reputed murders. The head of the clan, notorious old Socrates Palliades, was now bedridden, felled by a stroke, a ninety-year-old malevolent mummy after a career that had been infamous even for a Greek ship owner.
 

This hard-faced young tiger in the black Chesterfield and homburg hat was Palliades’s grandson and corporate hatchet man. At any other time Jackson Storm wouldn’t have wasted his breath on a man like Palliades. But right now he needed the Greek’s money.
 

“I’ve been to Mortessier’s.” Nicholas Palliades paused, as Mindy Ferragamo returned dragging in another office chair. He regarded her with the barest flicker of curiosity in his obsidian eyes. “I saw Vasse’s collection this afternoon.” His voice was void of emotion as he said, “If you get him as your designer, Palliades-Poseidon is definitely interested.”
 

Jackson Storm still stood with his hand extended for a handshake that he realized, belatedly, was not forthcoming.
Son of a bitch,
he told himself, reluctantly impressed.
The kid’s a world-class bastard. And he works at it.
 

“I’m glad to hear that.” Jack didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “So you think I ought to hire Gilles Vasse, Mr. Palliades?” He smiled as he came around his desk. “Tell me what you think I can—”
 

But Nicholas Palliades walked around the chair brought in for him and turned away, dismissively.
 

“And the girl.” His impeccably tailored back was just as impassive retreating. “Get the model, Alix, too,” he added from the hallway. “Without her, there’s no deal.”
 

The door slammed shut.
 

Three

The snow continued, a solid, smooth sheet of sparkling white spreading thickly over the City of Lights. From his workroom window, Gilles Vasse looked out on the avenue Montaigne and worried about getting home. He rode his motorcycle to work these days so that Lisianne could use their ancient Renault, but the Yamaha was an uncontrollable pig on snow-covered surfaces. And especially at the hair-raising speeds that Gilles, like any true Frenchman, liked to travel.
 

Below, the snow-filled avenue Montaigne ran only a few blocks from the Rond-Point des Champs Elysées to the Place de l’Alma and the banks of the Seine. Crammed with couture houses, this thoroughfare had begun to resemble the Champs Elysées, once considered the “world’s most elegant street.” Nina Ricci, Dior, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Guy Laroche, Hanae Mori, and Valentino—all were located within a few blocks, as well as jewelers Harry Winston, Gerard, Bulgari, and Cartiers, the firm of Porthault, draper to Europe’s royalty, and the master luggage and saddlemaker Vuitton. The boutiques were mixed democratically with the residences of some of the most distinguished families of Europe: the Princess Pauline de Croy, the Comte and Comtesse Thierry de Ganay, multi-billionaire Adnan Kashoggi, now in jail for international fraud, and the Prince and Princess Alexandre of Yugoslavia.
 

For Gilles, the avenue Montaigne’s wealth and artistry was an everyday sight; he was interested only in the snowstorm. He saw that Christian Dior, with its distinctive blue and white swagged front door, had closed early. So had Carven farther down. The bare branches of the plane trees in the parklike median glittered with thousands of ice-covered tiny golden lights. Below this sparkling canopy a line of chauffeured Rolls Royces and Mercedes limousines waited for the late-staying customers of Valentino and Mori. Even in the holiday off-season, the avenue Montaigne’s couture houses were busy with last-minute rush orders for Christmas balls and the famed, much sought-after
tout Paris
New Year’s galas.
 

From the noise in the hallway, Gilles gathered Mortessier’s atelier was also closing early. The first group of seamstresses clattered down the steel treads of the backstairs, their slangy Parisian voices exclaiming over the cold as they let themselves out the employees’ entrance and headed for the Metro and the concrete housing developments of working-class East Paris.
 

It was time to go, Gilles told himself, and hope the snow wouldn’t turn into freezing rain as it had so often that winter. It would take him the best part of an hour, anyway, to navigate traffic-clogged Paris to his tiny little apartment in the Opera district.
 

As Gilles reached over the drawing board to turn out the light, his eye caught the sketch he’d been working on. He stopped, staring down at it, astounded to see that he’d drawn his wife’s face where he usually put just a blank oval.
 

Good Lord, what had he been thinking of? Lisianne’s lovely face half-smiled up at him, a sure sign his concentration had been wandering. Again, he thought dismally.
 

Gilles loosened the tacks that held the paper to the board. Those cool, distinctively beautiful features were undeniably Lisianne—once Galanos’s top model and still, in Gilles’s estimation, the most beautiful woman in Paris, now retired to domesticity and forthcoming motherhood.